It takes car companies about three years to design a sedan, and handset makers can churn out a new smartphone in six months. But an IKEA kitchen takes half a decade to create. …

“It’s five years of work into finding ways to engineer cost out of the system, to improve the functionality,” Mr. Agnefjäll said of the company’s “Metod” kitchen, a new model, during an interview at a store in his hometown of Malmo, located on Sweden’s southwest coast.

The Metod kitchen (translated as “Method” in English), is the brainchild of a clutch of designers sitting near IKEA’s headquarters here. The goal is to achieve “democratic design,” products that will work in homes whether they are located in Beijing, Madrid or Topeka.

IKEA—known for minimalist design—packs enormous complexity into a kitchen. Metod consists of 1,100 different components, and distilling them all into a cheap, green and easily shippable package has proved arduous.

As the Swedes tell it, they go through a lot of steps to get the design just right.

So is the Journal right to label IKEA as slow and plodding?

It seems to me that IKEA’s design process is very much in line with their overall strategy and it is a little unfair to compare their process to carmakers. Theirs is a business built on volume. There are no halo products among their kitchens that sell only in limited quantities as Chevy has with the Corvette. And if you are going to sell thousands of kitchens a year over many years, then it is worth investing in the design upfront so it can be produced in the planned quantity at the planned price.

There are other factors that come into play. There is a segment of customers who will buy a new car every five years or so. Only true masochists replace their kitchens every five years. A slower customer cycle should slow the design cycle. If customers are only coming into the kitchen market every ten years or so, then a design that is seven years old can still seem fairly fresh to the consumer — it’s something that wasn’t there the last time they consider their kitchen.

Finally, another consideration is competition. The car industry is brutally competitive. A bad design is costly and likely demands a quick redo (as Honda did a few years ago with the Civic). It is not clear that IKEA faces the same competitive pressure. They are at the low-end of the market for kitchens and the most likely competition (at least in the States) is from big box home improvement stores. But Home Depot or Lowe’s do not offer the all-encompassing solutions that IKEA does. That is, Lowe’s can trick your kitchen out with matching cabinets but they do not offer the complementing drawer organizers that IKEA has. The Lowe’s product may have equal or better construction but IKEA is pushing higher design content and overall vision.

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Quite interesting points, tough – five years still seem very long time. I don’t think that just because car industry is different in nature it is less concerned about cost efficiency and engineering ingenuity. The one aspect which makes such long cycle justifiable I think is that they’re increasing their flexibility to adjust to design trends (concerning that they’re slow cycle market).

I think the important thing to take away from this post is Ikea’s stressed importance of Total Cost of Ownership. Because the company sinks so much money into research and development for its product, it places a high value on the product’s meaning to the customer. Ikea differentiates itself from other “Big Box” stores because it can offer the total package: offering “complementing drawer organizers” and the like. Other stores (for the same price) simply cannot do that; it is incredible the amount of precision that is put into buying a massive kitchen set that is arranged down to the utensils and floor mats.

Herein lies Ikea’s core competency. By providing this total package it makes itself stand out. I can personally say that I’ve never been to an Ikea store in the states that wasn’t packed, even 5 minutes after opening or before closing. The concept is a hit in the U.S., and its long lead times for its design process seem to be well worth it.

True, it might be difficult to procure goods that might seem “fashionable” in the next 5 years, but Ikea’s more reserved style can eliminate this potential problem. Through extensive customer surveys, Ikea’s product designers can obtain a pretty good grasp on what the company needs for future projects. Conservatism is a strategy that plays well for Ikea, avoiding (for the most part) tastes that are so cutting-edge that they quickly run out of style.

While procurement might seem like a potential issue, your attached video describes pretty well how the company’s designers deal with possible issues by forecasting demand and style as best as possible.